Free The Stream of Life by Clarice Lispector Page A

what I've already lived, it seems to me that I was leaving my bodies all along the way.
    It's almost five o'clock in the morning. And the fainting light of dawn, cold, bluish steel and with the tart bitterness of the day being born of the shadows. And emerging bright, on the surface of time, I, too, I'm being born out of the darkness, I, impersonal, who am it.
    I'm going to tell you something. I don't know how to paint any better or worse than I do. I paint a this. And I write with this— it's all I can do. Restlessly. The liters of blood that circulate in my veins. The muscles contracting and relaxing. The aura of the body in full moon. Parambolic—whatever that word means. Parambolic that I am. I can't sum myself up because it's impossible to add up a chair and two apples. I'm a chair and two apples. And I don't add up.
    I'm in happy love once again. What you are I quickly breath in, inhaling your aura of wonder before it vanishes into the vaporized air. Is my fresh will to live myself and to live you the very structure of life? The nature of beings and things—is it God? Perhaps, then, if I demand a lot of nature, will I stop dying? Can I violate death and open a crack in it for life?
    I cut off the pain of what I'm writing you and I offer you my restless happiness.
    And in this now-instant I see white statues scattered in the perspective of long, far-off distances—evermore distant in the desert where I lose myself with an empty gaze, I myself a statue to be seen from a distance, I who am always losing myself, I'm taking advantage of what exists. Silent, ethereal, in my great dream. Since I understand nothing—I therefore cling to a vacillating, mobile reality. I attain the real through my dreams. I invent you, reality. And I hear you like remote bells deafly submerged in the water chiming tremolos. Am I in the core of death? And is this the reason I'm alive? The sensitive core. And the it vibrates me. I'm alive. Like a wound, a flower in the flesh, the path of aching blood is open within me. With the direct and for that very reason innocent eroticism of the Indians of the Holy Lake. I, exposed to the inclemencies, I, an inscription opened on the back of a stone, within the long chronological spaces bequeathed by prehistorical man. The hot wind of great millennial expanses blows and ruffles my surface.
    Today I used red ocre, yellow ocre, black, and a little white. I feel that I'm in the proximity of springs, lakes and waterfalls, all with abundant fresh water for my thirst. And I, savage finally and finally free of the dry days of today: I trot back and forth without boundaries. I carry out solar cults on the slopes of high mountains. But I'm taboo to myself, untouchable because forbidden. Am I the hero who carries the fiery torch in an eternal race?
    Oh, Force of all that Exists, help me, you whom they call God. Why is it that the terrible horror calls to me? what do I want with my horror? because my demon is an assassin and doesn't fear punishment: but the crime is more important than the punishment. I make myself come alive in my happy instinct for destruction.
    Try to understand what I paint and what I'm now writing. I'm going to explain: in my painting, as in my writing, I try to see strictly within the moment when I see— and not to see through the memory of having seen in an instant now past. The instant is that. The instant is of an imminence that takes my breath away. The instant is in itself imminent. At the same time that I live it, I hurl myself into its passage to another instant.
    That's how I saw the church portal I painted. You questioned the excess symmetry. Let me explain: symmetry was the most successful thing I did. I've lost my fear of symmetry, after the disorder of inspiration. You need either experience or courage to reevaluate symmetry, when you can easily imitate the falsely asymmetrical, one of the most common originalities. My symmetry in the church portals is concentrated, successful,